October 29, 2017 at 9:05 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Far are You Willing To Go To Get Something?
October 30, 2017 at 1:22 am
I'd rather cue outside a record shop from midnight and know I'd get a coveted concert ticket when the shop opened in the morning than desperately try to buy said ticket in the first 3 seconds of it being on sale on TicketMaster, only to find myself being forwarded to SeatWave where I have the honour of buying the ticket at many times' the original price.
(BTW, why do I get a red wavy underline for the word 'honour'? Does this site prefer U.S. spelling?)
October 30, 2017 at 6:27 am
Depends on the circumstances professional and personally.
I'm not one to stand in line at midnight for a optional consumer item that I can purchase at a later time. I will get up earlier to get my automobile serviced on a weekend or to avoid the crowds at the grocery store. As far a professionally, I've committed plenty of extra money and time on training, books and projects that weren't necessarily required, but helped later. Stayed late or came in on Saturday to help clients and coworkers. Covered Y2K at New Years just to make managers happy.
Personally I'm learning two new programming languages and some tricky math just to play with a home brew data radio system. It's more challenging and beautiful than my normal ETL tasks at work. It has personal meaning beyond the paycheck.
October 30, 2017 at 8:06 am
haha..good story about NES mini.
At the stage of my life, I would never do this for a consumer product that will become available after several weeks anyway. But to make sure I have the item for my kids on a specific day (b-day, x-mas), I'd do it in a heartbeat. 🙂
Funny, I'm going through a similar experience right now for one of my sons with the Intel i7-8700K CPU chip. Crazyness. It's his x-max present. I still don't have one.. haha.. he may have to deal with a card and a picture of it on it.
October 30, 2017 at 8:40 am
I am willing to do a lot. I've been in my current job for about 2.5 years. They don't pay for training, going to to conferences, etc. They haven't paid for training of any sort of decades. And the state of software around here unfortunately shows it. But because of what I learned from my previous unemployment, I know that training is vital. So I pay for my own Pluralsight subscription. I also download Channel 9 videos, Microsoft Virtual Academy and any others I can get my hands onto. Because I have a long commute I download training courses onto my laptop and watch them there there. I've probably taken about 25 courses this way. Unfortunately, I have very little opportunity to use any of it here, due to most systems being so old. But I'm sure that some day I'll be able to use them.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
October 30, 2017 at 10:26 am
Rod at work - Monday, October 30, 2017 8:40 AMI am willing to do a lot. I've been in my current job for about 2.5 years. They don't pay for training, going to to conferences, etc. They haven't paid for training of any sort of decades. And the state of software around here unfortunately shows it. But because of what I learned from my previous unemployment, I know that training is vital. So I pay for my own Pluralsight subscription. I also download Channel 9 videos, Microsoft Virtual Academy and any others I can get my hands onto. Because I have a long commute I download training courses onto my laptop and watch them there there. I've probably taken about 25 courses this way. Unfortunately, I have very little opportunity to use any of it here, due to most systems being so old. But I'm sure that some day I'll be able to use them.
Respect for the dedication and commitment, you have it right! Keep learning and striving, MVA is a good source imho. Sometimes it is possible to feel the road has turned into a dust track and the way is lost. How far would I go now? Think I need inspiration for that. NB no learning is wasted.
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October 30, 2017 at 4:36 pm
Great editorial. The story really brought it to life, and I was chuckling to myself while reading it.
Leonard
Madison, WI
October 30, 2017 at 5:18 pm
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it.
Ben
October 31, 2017 at 6:10 am
How far am I willing to go? Well, similar to your NES Classic example, I saw Capcom was re-releasing the 1990's nostalgia-fueled special edition of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior on the SNES Classic. It's an actual, working Super Nintendo cartridge (that may or may not catch fire and burn my house down). There are two variants of this cartridge: one in "Opaque Ryu Headband Red" and the other in "Glow in the Dark Blanka Green." The glowing cart is translucent in addition to luminescent. The red version is limited to 4,500 copies, while the glow in the dark variant is limited to just 1,000. And they're randomly inserted into the packages, too, so buying one is a bit of a roll of the dice.
So, I'm a huge Blanka fan and MUST HAVE THAT GREEN LIMITED cartridge. I dropped $100 on it and now praying I get randomly selected of the 1,000 to get it. If I don't, I would imagine I would do anything to get it. 🙂
October 31, 2017 at 9:35 pm
Heh... amazing. People keep coming out with articles about how far will you go to "learn something new". Your article struck a bit of a cord with me because people were actually waiting in line for something old but in a slightly different package. I don't find that to be true in the world of data. A lot of people are always looking for the next bright shinny object and will spend grand amounts of time learning that and say "it's an improvement"... without having learned what the old stuff they already have well enough to actually make that judgment. When the next shinny object comes out after that, they say "it's an improvement" and they still don't actually know if it is or not.
Someone needs to write an article about how far will you go to "learn something old that has always worked and continues to work"?
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
November 1, 2017 at 6:24 am
That is an interesting thought. So exactly what sort of old stuff are you talking about? In most cases on the dev side I don't encourage people to learn C++, I would point them more toward .net C#. It is sort of interesting on the db side because people can be so isolated in what they do. For instance a DB admin, knows how to setup / install sql server. Get backups going etc. Still, their t-sql skill may be terrible. Anyway, let me know what sort of old stuff you think people should be learning, try to be more specific.
Thanks for your comment.
Ben
November 1, 2017 at 7:38 am
bkubicek - Wednesday, November 1, 2017 6:24 AMThat is an interesting thought. So exactly what sort of old stuff are you talking about? In most cases on the dev side I don't encourage people to learn C++, I would point them more toward .net C#. It is sort of interesting on the db side because people can be so isolated in what they do. For instance a DB admin, knows how to setup / install sql server. Get backups going etc. Still, their t-sql skill may be terrible. Anyway, let me know what sort of old stuff you think people should be learning, try to be more specific.Thanks for your comment.
Ben
I think he is mostly referring to the fact people are quick to jump on something new rather than take the time to fully lean what they have.
November 1, 2017 at 6:51 pm
bkubicek - Wednesday, November 1, 2017 6:24 AMThat is an interesting thought. So exactly what sort of old stuff are you talking about? In most cases on the dev side I don't encourage people to learn C++, I would point them more toward .net C#. It is sort of interesting on the db side because people can be so isolated in what they do. For instance a DB admin, knows how to setup / install sql server. Get backups going etc. Still, their t-sql skill may be terrible. Anyway, let me know what sort of old stuff you think people should be learning, try to be more specific.Thanks for your comment.
Ben
It's mostly the T-SQL skills I'm talking about but there are other things, as well.
For some examples on the T-SQL side... and, no, I couldn't make this stuff up because it's just too fantastic... I had a "developer" bring me some code to review that would create a CLR. I told him that I wouldn't allow that particular CLR to go in and before I could explain why and how easy it was to do in T-SQL, he said something to the effect of "We'll just see about that" and stormed out of the room. To make a much longer story shorter, he convinced the managers to call me out on the carpet in a grand meeting designed to disgrace me and compel me to allow the code. I explained how simple and, basically, how stupid the code was and now the "developer" was on the spot. What was the CLR for? It was an SQLCLR function to calculate modulus. You know, the thing that the "%" operator is for.
Anther wrote an SQLCLR to do an "UPSERT" in SQL Server 2000 (most use Merge nowadays) because he couldn't figure out how to do it in T-SQL. Very nearly the same result there.
Then there are things like code just flat out taking too long to run. One company asked me to stand up an entire server just so they could do this one year end report because "we've always had to do this because the code cripples the production server". They were right... in testing, it would run TempDB out of space every time. I made one Temp Table to hold a small amount of interim data and their more than 30 table join single query suddenly went from taking more than 30 minutes and crushing the server down to 3 seconds and didn't even show up on PerfMon for CPU usage.
Then there are really old things like using very high performance CROSS TABs instead of using PIVOTs. CROSS TABS used to be covered in Books Online but no more. Now they tell you how to use PIVOT.
Then there's all those DBAs that I've interviewed that don't know how to do a native backup and restore because they bought tools to do that and are dead meat when a company tells them they're not buying those tools.
Heh... then, there was the initial PowerShell craze. If you hadn't converted your enterprise-wide backups to being centrally controlled from a PowerShell script, well you just weren't a cool kid. But no one considered what happens to all the log files and related drive space on all your servers if that one central controlling system went south for the winter. Since I did it the old way where each server is autonomous in the area of backups, I never had to worry about that.
There's also the proverbial "Tower of Babel" in ETL systems. SSIS. Web Methods. Business Objects. Whatever. How many times have we heard "and then you write a script task" in conjunction with all those things? For everything that I've had to do for the last 20 years, the old stuff such as BCP, BULK INSERT, and a smattering of DOS along with a bit of T-SQL has worked just fine and continues to do so with great performance on some rather large files sourced from the 4 corners of the U.S.A. from multiple source types for anything from (ugh!) reel-to-real tapes and modems to SFTP sites.and even some good ol' fashioned web site screen scrapping.
And then there's system monitoring. The company I currently work for spent a small fortune on software that monitors systems and hard disks and performance and ... and... and. To date, none of that software has actually been able to identify performance problems. None of it has actually given enough warning about hard disks that have crossed the 10% free space line nor been able to predict when the hard disk will run out of space based on the bazillion bytes of history that's been stored over the years. But, my old stuff does. For example, I wrote a system using T-SQL and makes some calls to old WMI using old xp_CmdShell. Every morning, I get a single email that says out of the 285 systems that the code monitors, here's the small handful of disks that we need to watch or expand including disks that have an "IsDirty" bit set that will need a DiskScan on the next reboot. It even checks all the servers for portable storage devices like CDs, memory sticks, and other USB devices to help the Network Operations folks find such devices they may have misplaced and can't find. It's all old stuff and it all still works.
Those are just some of the examples of the old stuff or old ways of doing things and the reason why it still works for me is that I took the time to learn the tools that are available on every SQL Server including T-SQL, DOS, and WMI instead of being distracted by purple squirrels and the latest cool-kid stuff that sometimes goes away in just a month or two.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
November 2, 2017 at 6:33 am
Hi Jeff,
I really appreciate you taking the time to reply with so much detail. I agree with a lot of what you posted. I am not totally sure I would steer people toward dos and batch files. I have also used those a lot, but I am trying to get more familiar with Powershell instead. I do agree that sometimes people do just go after the latest shiny thing, but I would guess those people aren't really learning things all that well. I would hope when they learn something new they are able to apply it to real world problems and do something practical with that knowledge. Anyway, I do appreciate your post and perhaps an article will be born out of it.
Thanks,
Ben
November 2, 2017 at 8:01 am
bkubicek - Thursday, November 2, 2017 6:33 AMHi Jeff,
I really appreciate you taking the time to reply with so much detail. I agree with a lot of what you posted. I am not totally sure I would steer people toward dos and batch files. I have also used those a lot, but I am trying to get more familiar with Powershell instead. I do agree that sometimes people do just go after the latest shiny thing, but I would guess those people aren't really learning things all that well. I would hope when they learn something new they are able to apply it to real world problems and do something practical with that knowledge. Anyway, I do appreciate your post and perhaps an article will be born out of it.Thanks,
Ben
Just to continue the interesting conversation a bit (and thank you for engaging), I've underlined a bit in your quote above.
On the not steering people towards DOS and Batch Files thing, I do understand that although I'd likely make the suggestion when it's actually appropriate (oddly enough, though, I do find it to be appropriate more often than not but that's me). The key here is that you DO know that bit of "old stuff" and have a basis to measure something new against. A lot of people aren't even aware that things like DOS and WMI exist never mind the power that's built into them. Heh... I tried to explain to someone how to step through some files to do something fairly easy and I told them about "the FORFILES command in DOS". Their question was "Ok... that's cool. What's DOS"? <headdesk>
On the learning PowerShell thing, I have mixed feelings about it. One of the reasons why I like SQL Server so much is that I don't have to write loops. They're auto-magically built into things like the SELECT statement and I refer to those loops behind the scenes as "Pseudo-Cursor". With PowerShell, I've found that it's mostly procedural and does require a fair bit of looping. Even certain DOS commands, like FORFILES, have Pseudo-Cursors in them so I don't have to write explicit loops. Yeah, I know... I'm lazy but in a good kind of way. 😉
I also find that a lot of people that are apparently more comfortable with procedural languages using PowerShell to do things in SQL Server that can be a whole lot easier to do within SQL Server if you just know how. That's one of the primary points that I've been trying to make about using other things instead of using the thing that's old and has always been there.
On that note, there's been some incredible work done in PowerShell and you wouldn't expect otherwise from such a powerful tool. For example, there's a code set for PowerShell called "DBATools" and, from what I've seen, it does have some awesome tools built in. The trouble is, it's like an application... it's not currently (if I understand correctly) something that's built in and maintained by monthly updates to the operating system. That means that it's yet another thing that you have to check for updates, isn't available on every machine, etc, etc. There's also a fair bit of it that can actually be done in T-SQL itself and so I do. I suppose that a part of the reason why I don't use it is that we're fairly well consolidated to keep license costs down and so I don't have to maintain hundreds of SQL Servers. Someone that does would probably find more utility in the DBATools than I. Still, it would be interesting to find out what happens when someone well versed in those tools are isn't allowed to use them (on certain government controlled secure systems, for example, although not a usual case).
Speaking of tools... OMG! The things people buy simply because they don't know what's available naturally. Backup software is one of those things that irks the hell out of me. People will buy uber-flexible software (initial cost and yearly maintenance fees can cost a small fortune if you have a lot of servers) and then use it generically because they don't have anything special going on in their databases. They don't realize how simple it is to write something to handle their generic needs because they don't actually know anything about T-SQL backups never mind what type of backups to make or when or anything on the subject of RPO or RTO. They also never test their backups as a restore because they end up assuming that the 3rd party software somehow makes everything bullet-proof.
Then there's monster software like Web Methods. One company that I've worked for bought it because the Enterprise Architect insisted that he didn't want to do ETL in SQL Server. In case you don't know what Web Methods is, it's like SSIS on steroids. So is the price and the learning curve. The company spend $250K on the initial purchase, found out it actually didn't do everything they wanted, spent another $100K to buy an add-on, and what did they end up with? A difficult to use, initial high cost with yearly maintenance fees, scheduler that calls T-SQL Stored Procedures to do <insert drum roll here> Bulk Inserts. <headdesk> <headdesk> <headdesk> <major face-palm>.
Heh... a lot of people think I'm a Luddite. I'm not. I just can't see spending a whole lot of money either purchasing software or learning to build software using the latest cool-kid software when everything you need is already available, is frequently easier to use, and is just as frequently better to use. People say "Well Jeff, just because you can do something in SQL Server doesn't mean you should". Thinking to myself "Why the hell not?", my normal retort is "Well dude, just because you can do something in SQL Server, doesn't mean you SHOULDN'T. Save yourself a shedload of money, lost time on learning curves, avoid the proverbial "Tower of Babel", and learn the tools you have".
Of course, almost everyone then walks away from the conversation shaking their head thinking "Jeff's a bloody Luddite" even after a demonstration of what can be done so easily and quickly because I know the tools that are already there.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
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